The Pirates and the Girl

grandmothers story.

People snatching was a thing that happened at different times round the British Isles. The first raiders, the Vikings, in the eighth and ninth centuries took women and men as slaves, but later from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century there are recorded incidents from Southern Ireland and Cornwall, the Faroe Islands and even Iceland, of Barbary Pirates raiding the coast and taking people, sometimes whole villages, to sell in the slave markets of North Africa.

Grandmother's Story.

I was fourteen years old. My grandmother and I used to sit and knit to pass the time in the long winter evenings. There was only her and me now. She talked in the old dialect still. My parents had been lost at sea returning to the island one stormy day. We had the croft; a few sheep, a planticru for cabbage and kale, tatties and a few hens. She was very fit and could work about the croft as well as any man.

While we were good friends and company I felt a great longing for a young man.

When I told grandmother this she smiled,

“Ah ken when Ah wis your age the sam thing cam on me. And Ah waandered by the shore lookin fur shells and queer things that might be washed up.

I always hid a bag over ma shooder for to pit things in. I carried some bread too. Ah collected herbs fur the bonesetter. Ah became pretty skilled at the herbs - ah kent whit would mak things heal, wit would help a fever, wit would mak ye sleep, wit might kill ye if ye wurna careful.

Waal, occasionally a fishing boat wid cum right in close to shelter but ah didna get to

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Texte: alastair macleod
Bildmaterialien: alastair macleod: painting photo purchased from Dreamstime royalty free images.
Lektorat: alastair macleod
Übersetzung: cover typeset in classical.
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 12.03.2017
ISBN: 978-3-7438-0198-1

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Widmung:
To our grandmothers who were not always old.